Question 1) Is it possible to use a subdomain for my Posterous account? I know a domain is possible but not so sure about a sub-domain. I thought blog.mydomain.com would be great.

Answer: “blog.mydomain.com works great”

My Take: A short but very sweet answer. I am not always a proponent of using a sub-domain for a blog but the fact that Posterous offers that capability makes it all the more alluring.

Question 2) When will it be possible to use my own URL shortener? I would really rather not use yours so that I can keep all of my tracking in one place.

Answer: “We will add multiple url shortener support soon. Totally understand that. It’s probably a month or two away (lots of features ahead in the pipe)”

My Take: Excellent! I suggest that anyone considering a URL shortener (which is used to shrink long URLs for easy emailing/txting) use Bit.Ly because it is a great application and the company has some big aspirations that I think will pay off for its users.

Question 3) What if, god forbid, your site is no longer around in a year or three and I have a ton of data and reputation heaped onto my Posterous account. Is there, or will there be a way to export everything in case I need to go elsewhere? This seems a valuable option for anyone about to rely on your system for a business presence.

Answer: “We’ve got API’s for all export that you could need, and if anything ever happens, we’ll extend it and make it as easy as possible to get your data out. Heck, we’ll autopost the whole site someplace else.   — That being said, we have no plans to die. ”

My Take: I couldn’t have asked for a better answer than that one.

Question 4) I saw a post on how to add tags to an email but how do I specify the category a specific posting should be set for in my Wordpress when you post there?

Answer: “Any tags you send to Posterous turn into categories on Wordpress. They need to exist as categories on the Wordpress end first.”

My Take: Okay, I just have to get used to using the proper syntax they require in the subject of any Posterous-destined email: (tag: apple, gadgets). Not bad I guess, but it is a bit of a pain to try and remember the categories I have on my site before posting; shoot, I have to use my memory again!

Conclusion

Posterous is really turning out to be a great application. Once the upcoming customization and theming options are added Posterous is going to be one very popular site.

If you want to learn more about social media optimization check out today’s SEO 101 show which is available at our SEO 101 home page or via the player and link below.

Related posts:

1. Posterous is an Intelligent Social Media Posting Tool
2. Posterous’ Unfortunate Problem With Its Posterior

Gmail has been around now for just over 5 years (since April 1, 2004). Five years of beta, and at last we get a version that Google feels confident enough to call complete!

The official Google Blog posted earlier today that Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk are now officially out of beta! Some of these applications still have the beta label in place, but they will be removed sometime today.

What does this mean for the average user? Well – nothing really – just the confidence in knowing that Google is finally comfortable enough with some of their products that they can call them complete.

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I am just getting into using my own account at RossDunn.Posterous.com so I still have some experience to gain but I have to say it is brilliantly simple. For example, I found out about the Arrington Crunchpad tonight and I decided to Share it on Posterous. All I had to do was click a button my browser to share it and add comments if I wished and voila! My Twitter, Facebook and personal blog Consider it Dunn all got updated within seconds with the latest post – brilliantly simple indeed. I am not quite ready to use it to publish to our StepForth Web Marketing blog yet but I can see the day coming where I will.

by Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth Web Marketing Inc.
Increasing the bottom line online for clients since 1997

Related posts:

1. Posterous Questions Answered
2. Posterous’ Unfortunate Problem With Its Posterior

Why is this mispronunciation/misspelling a problem? Well first of all the creators of Posterous seem not to have considered the misspelling from the beginning because they do not own Posterious.com. Second of all, doesn’t Posterious sound a whole lot like, well, a variation of posterior? I don’t know about you but I don’t think I would ever want my startup even remotely associated with, er, the posterior of anything.

Posterous is going to have a hell of a branding problem with people not pronouncing their name correctly (although in their defence they shouldn’t be having a problem). So what now? If you were in this same situation what should you do? Well, I am thinking whoever owns www.Posterious.com is getting some darned decent traffic and can expect to be propositioned by the Posterous team for a buyout; if it hasn’t already. If not, well, Posterous will have to wait until it is popular enough that the majority of users do not make that spelling mistake; I am relatively sure the company is going to be very successful so there is a good chance that will happen. Another option is to perhaps place the phonetics of their name below their logo in central areas of their site – not pretty but effective.

To avoid this from ever having happened Posterous should have consulted Jim Hedger because I guarantee you he would have kiboshed that name right away after a giggle or two (if you know Jim you know I am right!). You see once when Jim was my employee at StepForth, he and I were occasionally in the position of helping clients determine business names while planning marketing strategies. Well, I tell you, during those brainstorming sessions where he and I tried to think of names there were many quashed ideas because the word(s) sounded too close to something completely inappropriate; we had good laughs but we always came up with a great name in the end.

So if you are going to pick a name for your company/website consider this far from exhaustive list of rules and apply each rule if possible:

• Choose a name that is not easily misspelled.
• Every domain can be misspelled so be sure to secure the misspellings of the domain before launching the site. This is because if your site is a hit it will be more costly to secure the misspellings if someone is using/squatting them.
• Make certain the name you choose does not have a completely horrific translation in another language – unless that market means nothing to you and you don’t mind a little ribbing from the press when the news gets out.
• Consider designing the logo to make the phonetics of the business/website name more obvious. In the case of Posterous, they used what appears to be a post-it note of sorts as a part of their logo. Unfortunately, I find the usage of the post-it far too subtle. Perhaps a dog-eared or raised corner with shadowing would help drive the point home?

All I know is I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of the marketer who has to constantly correct people’s pronunciation. Oh and I pray Posterious isn’t purchased by Clusty; although I suppose that would be yet another great gift from God to the comedians of the world.

Related posts:

1. Posterous is an Intelligent Social Media Posting Tool
2. Posterous Questions Answered

We will be open, business as usual, on Friday July 3 & Monday July 6 for those of you not taking a long weekend.

From all of us at StepForth we wish all of you a safe and enjoyable holiday!

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• It is twice as fast as Firefox 3: an impressive feat!
• You can save movies as easily as saving an image,
• It will download fonts from websites if your computer does not have the necessary font – this is very new and very very cool. Why? Because now sites can include their very own custom fonts that can add a lot of pizazz to a site and create a very unique look. Now you will be able to see the site as the designer intended.
• It offers location-aware browsing: an option that will enable the browser to tell websites where you are located so that they can tailor their content for your area. Again this is an OPTION do not fret over your privacy.
• You can surf the net anonymously using private browsing options just like Google Chrome offered when it released.

BUT! I do not suggest upgrading yet IF YOU USE PLUGINS because there is a good chance they will not yet work with the new version. I am personally going to hold off on my business machine because I have some valuable plugins on Firefox that I use for website analysis and I can’t afford to lose them right now. But I am not worried because it is only a matter of time until I can upgrade without losing any functionality. That is because in just a few weeks most will be upgraded to work the the new version so I will wait until then. I suggest you do as well if you are in the same boat I am.

Here is a video from the Firefox team explaining the cool upgrades in Firefox 3.5

by Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth Web Marketing Inc.
Increasing the bottom line online for clients since 1997

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One critical element that this intro leaves out is you can add your own videos to your Google Local Business profile. I don’t see many businesses taking advantage of the video option so I highly recommend whipping up your own and putting it on YouTube. Then all you need to is link to it from your listing. You can even link to an interview of yourself or about your business if it is available on YouTube like we at StepForth did.

Depending on your industry the video likely does not have to be super professional; it just needs to get across what you want to say about your business so viewers can get a feel for who you are and what you can offer. Explain why your service is better than your average competitor by differentiating yourself in terms of a unique offer (not just – “we are better”); differentiation is the key to many successful sales.

By juicing your local business profile with video and the other options such as product/service images, coupons and other information you can set up an amazing landing page on Google. And best of yet, it is all for free!

by Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth Web Marketing Inc.
“Increasing our client’s bottom lines online since 1997″

Related posts:

1. Bing’s Local Listing Center Lacks Forethought

If you are in the USA the process to get your local listing is straight forward – at least as far as I got. Just go to the Bing Local Listing Center and log in with your Microsoft Passport (or create one) and if the system does not find a current listing it will allow you to create one. Well StepForth does not have one yet according to their system so I was directed to the listing local listing creation page. When I got to the creation page and began to fill out the submission form I was rebuffed by a big pet peeve of mine… the system knew I was Canadian (it is noted in the header of the page) and yet the only way to add a listing was to enter a State and Zip (see screenshot).

I realize this is a nitpicky post but I am fed up with oversights in this regard. I mean how hard can it be to say “I am sorry but Bing Local Listings is not supporting Canada right now – click here to be notified when it becomes available” instead of finding out later on that it only supports the States? Thankfully the form is not long, so I don’t discover this fact after entering a ton of information, which I have experienced all too often. Come on Microsoft! Get with it!

Mini-rant complete. Thank you for listening.

Related posts:

1. Bing Bing Bing! The Search Foe is Online
2. Juicing Up Your Google Local Listing
3. Bing is Microsoft’s Latest Name for Search

So what is the deal? What did Matt say? Let’s examine the details based on his post:

Matt’s Post: “So what happens when you have a page with ‘ten PageRank points’ and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? … Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.” (Colour formatting added.)

Essentially Google claims to have rendered nofollow sculpting useless because each nofollowed link would still use up a point of PageRank instead of saving that PageRank for other (better) links on the page. So what happens to that used up point of PageRank if it does not benefit the site being linked to? Well that was part of what generated the energized discussions at SMX Advanced; Matt said the PageRank evaporated. In his recent post, however, in response to that very question Matt alluded that the seemingly vaporized PageRank still had a life but nothing that he could comment on:

“…it’s a bit complicated, esp. since Google doesn’t view pages exactly in the framework as “classic PageRank” any more. You can think of that PageRank going into the reset vector without being too far off.”

Heh, “reset vector” is bafflegab if I have ever seen it (at least to those not mathmatically inclined – like yours truly). Anyway, my take on that explanation is that the PageRank is still in play but likely in a severely reduced capacity when nofollow is used. The question I have  is whether the weakened PR point has any benefit to the page? Or is it stored as a separate algorithmic value used when calculating overall website reputation? I am sure there are many brighter minds than mine on the job and I look forward to hearing more. Overall though, it is just academic because PageRank Sculpting using nofollows was a tool best used only when some advanced techniques were needed to make a website in a competitive marketplace move that last few positions in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Is NoFollow Going to Hurt My Website?

If you are one of the multitudes of website owners that have used nofollows for sculpting don’t worry! There is absolutely no indication that using nofollow will harm your website rankings or your site’s online reputation. If you are still worried then consider the fact that this change happened a year ago so in actuality nothing has changed recently – just our perception of Google’s process. More importantly Google does not consider PageRank Sculpting or the use of nofollow unethical so penalties are not even a consideration at this point. That said, if you have used nofollow fanatically all throughout your site you may want to review the usage with a qualified SEO to make sure a better strategy is not being missed. There are a lot of options out there for increasing website visibility and nofollow PageRank Sculpting is only one of them.

So Does this All Mean PageRank Sculpting is Dead?

No, nothing so dramatic. Even Matt said that PageRank Sculpting is still effective when a site’s structure is conceptualized with PageRank in mind. And if such foreplanning was not possible I believe a similar form of PageRank Sculpting can still be done using links driven by external Javascript (one form of Javascript that Google is still not indexing – for now).

Page Rank Sculpting Related Content

• Care to learn more about PageRank Sculpting? My friend and mentor, Ralph Wilson wrote a great article describing its use in building an effective site structure.
• Here is Matt Cutts talking about PageRank Sculpting on YouTube. Just be warned… you might get confused because he says PageRank Sculpting using nofollows does have merit in this video.
• Danny Sullivan does a great job explaining the entire PageRank Sculpting debate from the first conference discussions in 2007.

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Not sure what I am talking about? What is HeadSpace?

If you are familiar with Wordpress but you have not heard of HeadSpace then you are in for a real treat. Check out this HeadSpace information page to get acquainted with this dream optimization plugin for Wordpress; easily the best single plugin for doing 99% of the optimizations required on Wordpress. In fact, I have to admit I don’t think I have used even a tenth of all the options that plugin provides… it is fabulous.

The rel=”follow” attribute is the supposed antithesis of the legitimate rel=”nofollow” attribute.

There is no such attribute as rel=”follow” . It is a logical move for some to assume it exists due to the popularity of the rel=”nofollow” attribute but in this case the logic simply does not extend that far. Why? Well the nofollow attribute is used to tell the search engines that you do not wish to be associated with a link; particularly useful when you are in the awkward position of linking to an undesirable site. If you leave out the nofollow tag you are saying you are fine with the link which is no different than the supposed “follow” action that the fake rel=”follow” attribute is used for. In other words, just remove the rel=”follow” attribute if you have it because it is not doing a single thing except taking up valuable code space in your page.

What happens if you forget to use rel=”nofollow” in a link to an undesirable site?

Here is a basic description: if you linked to an undesirable site without a nofollow it is a statement that you have no problem being associated with the linked site and a small part of the valuable PageRank your page has will be passed to the linked site thereby increasing its credibility to Google. In other words you will help out the linked site which may not be something you want to do.

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